My February Watches Ranked
Glad to be keeping up the pace so far, I was really concerned I might drop the ball as assignments started to roll around, but so far all is well.
Some really great stuff this month, including a surprising new personal favourite in Le Corbeau - a paranoid but elegant film about a town falling prey to a seemingly omniscient letter writer who has taken it upon themselves to lay bare everyone's secrets. A particular image from the film has been stuck in my mind ever since I saw it earlier in the month: the town, gathered in their cathedral for a funeral, watching in terror as a new letter flutters down from the rafters as though it were a message delivered from on high.
At the bottom of the list is the recent UK release of a shortened version of Terrence Malick's documentary Voyage of Time. Though I often very much enjoy the meditative pulse that keeps most of Malick's films alive, this is one of the first I found truly dull. Though I imagine the experience is quite different when the film is exhibited in its native IMAX format, on the considerably smaller screen it amounts to an exercise in navel-gazing, the variety of which, if you were to walk in on a screening at a museum, you'd sit tapping your foot impatiently before leaving five minutes later.
Here's everything I watched in February (as a note, the films were largely positively rated - with the only exceptions being Voyage and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both at two stars out of five.)
Le Corbeau (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943)
Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
Euphoria: Trouble Don’t Last Always (Sam Levinson, 2021)
Soy Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)
Ali & Ava (Clio Barnard, 2021)
Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)
Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)
Hearts & Minds (Peter Davis, 1974)
The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)
Milk (Andrea Arnold, 1998)
C’mon C’mon (Mike Mills, 2021)
Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello, 2019)
Euphoria: Fuck Anyone Who’s Not a Sea Blob (Sam Levinson, 2021)
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (Goran Olsson, 2011)
Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944)
Dog (Andrea Arnold, 2001)
The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940)
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1997)
The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)
The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
Soul of a Man (Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron, 2022)
Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)
Apostasy (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2017)
The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
Wasp (Andrea Arnold, 2003)
The Humans (Stephen Karam, 2021)
The Uninvited (Lewis Allen, 1944)
Junior (Julia Ducournau, 2011)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (David Blue Garcia, 2022)
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience (Terrence Malick, 2016)